Security Features in U.S. Paper Currency

It’s not enough for money to simply serve its basic function as legal tender, it’s also got to be smart—and increasingly so. Each time bills are redesigned they gain security features that make them more and more difficult to reproduce, and while U.S. paper currency has its fair share of detractors, there are some pretty awesome design elements at work when it comes to what’s in our wallets.

THE PAPER

Paper money isn’t actually paper at all—at 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, it’s essentially fabric, making it much more durable than actual paper would be. It takes about 4000 double folds before a bill will tear.

Graphic by Chloe Effron

A single company has provided the paper for U.S. bills since 1879—Crane & Co. in Dalton, Mass. The company has a storied place in U.S. history. In 1776, it was called Liberty Paper Mill, and serviced Paul Revere when he needed to print notes for paying American Revolution soldiers.

Finally, "greenbacks" they may be, but embedded throughout Federal Reserve Notes are tiny red and blue fibers. Counterfeiters often try to simulate these by printing tiny red and blue lines on the paper.

HIDDEN FEATURES

In a $5, $10, $20, or $50 bill, the paper contains a security thread and a watermark. To see them, you have to hold the note to the light, and the placement and style are different for each bill. The security thread glows a specific color when exposed to ultraviolet light.

Graphic by Chloe Effron

The $100 bill also has a wider, 3D holographic blue security ribbon woven into the paper to the right of Franklin’s portrait. If you tilt the note back and forth you can see the bells change to 100s, and move side to side. This feature adds a highly advanced level of security that’s difficult to simulate.

PRINTING

The redesigned $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills go through several stages of printing in order to create the finished notes. Each bill is printed four times on three different kinds of printing machinery. All bills utilize green ink on the backs, but faces use black, color-shifting, metallic ink, and other inks which are specially formulated and blended by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

In 2003, with the introduction of the redesigned $20s, subtle background colors were added to the currency to enhance the security. For these denominations, offset printing is the first printing that occurs on the “blank” paper. They’re printed using the BEP's Simultan presses, which are over 50 feet long and weigh over 70 tons. They're capable of printing 10,000 sheets per hour, and operators will regularly examine sheets to make sure the colors are remaining constant.

What's the use of a penny in today's economy? The U.S. government has been talking about doing away with the copper-plated coin for years, but so far, no progress has been made. Two big arguments against keeping the coin in production are time and cost. In 2016, the U.S. Mint spent 1.5 cents to produce each one, making the cost of every penny 50 percent higher than its actual value.

They also waste a lot of time. Citizens to Retire the U.S. Penny claims that handling pennies adds an average of two seconds to a cash transaction. According to a 2012 study by the Federal Reserve, there are 107 billion cash transactions per year in the United States.

To help you combat the penny problem, here are some strategies for spending them, plus ways to put them to creative use.

1. DEPOSIT THEM AT THE BANK.

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If you don't want your pennies, your bank will take them. Count them out, roll them in coin wrappers (ask your bank if they can give you some for free), and deposit them into your account. There are a few banks that will count coins for free and exchange them for bills so you can walk away with cold, hard cash. You can find participating institutions listed on Lifehacker and MyBankTracker.

2. TAKE THEM TO A COINSTAR MACHINE.

Coinstar machines are magical: You dump your jar of change into their depths and get cash in return. The major downside is that there's an 11.9 percent service fee. However, if you choose the eGift Card option, there's no fee. Options include Amazon, Starbucks, Sephora, iTunes, and Best Buy. Or, turn your coins into a tax-deductible donation to one of several charities. You can use Coinstar's website to find a machine near you.

3. MAKE A COLD COMPRESS.

If you don't have an ice pack in the freezer, try making one with the contents of your piggy bank. Throw some coppers into an old sock, tie it, and freeze it. (A plastic bag works, too.)

4. CREATE DIY DRAPERY WEIGHTS.

If your curtains flare out and won't stay straight, use pennies as drapery weights. Open the stitching at the bottom of your drapes and slide a few pennies in, then sew it back up.

5. SEPARATE THEM INTO DENOMINATIONS BEFOREHAND TO MAKE SHOPPING EASY.

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Organize your pennies into groups of five or 10 and put them into small Ziploc bags to keep in your purse or backpack. Then you can combine them to pay for something that calls for, say, 15 cents in change. Or, if your total comes to an amount that's not a multiple of five or 10, breaking open a baggie is easier than scrounging around in your coin purse.

6. DECORATE YOUR FLOORS …

If you have lots of pennies, use them for floor tiling. If you're feeling especially ambitious, try a pattern. The internet is full of stunning examples of penny flooring.

7. … OR MAKE A PENNY TABLE.

8. USE TAKE A PENNY, LEAVE A PENNY JARS.

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Take a penny, leave a penny trays are everywhere—but many people don't understand how they work. They're commonly seen at convenience stores or other small shops. Here's the rundown: Customers can take pennies from the bowl if they don't have change and don't want to break a bill. If you get pennies as part of your change for a transaction, you can get rid of them there, so they never even touch your wallet in the first place.

9. MAKE JEWELRY.

There are plenty of DIY penny jewelry ideas out there, including a bracelet, a lucky penny necklace, and a bejeweled ring. You can also make some hand-stamped bling like this pendant.

10. FUNNEL YOUR PENNIES INTO HOME DECOR.

There are endless ways to turn pennies into statement pieces for your pad. Paint them white to make this crafty vase, make them into coasters, decorate a mirror or a picture frame. Make some creative wall art, like this penny mosaic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, these block letters, or this ombré wall hanging. Or, find pennies from milestone years in your life and make a commemorative piece like thisone.

Every March, clocks “spring forward” across much of the United States, robbing people of one precious hour of sleep. While hearing those same people complain about being tired is one not-so-surprising effect of Daylight Saving Time, the possibility of a longer prison sentence for those going before a judge on “sleepy Monday” is less expected. Here are 12 surprising effects of Daylight Saving Time—the good, the bad, and the scientifically ambiguous.

1. INCREASED SPENDING

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In 2016, JP Morgan Chase decided to look into the economic consequences of Daylight Saving Time (DST) by examining Los Angeles and Phoenix, two cities that are large, relatively close to each other, and have stable weather. Critically, Phoenix doesn’t observe DST while Los Angeles does [PDF].

Among their findings, DST was “associated with a 0.9 percent increase in daily card spending per capita in Los Angeles at the beginning of DST.” Perhaps more surprising, the end of DST was associated with a per capita daily spending reduction of 3.9 percent.

2. A HIGHER RISK OF HEART ATTACKS

Many studies have shown that DST is associated with an increase in heart attacks, with one study showing a 24 percent increase in the number of heart attacks on the Monday after DST at a group of Michigan hospitals. According to the University of Michigan, Mondays are bad for heart attacks in general (researchers believes the stress of beginning a new workweek and changes to the sleep-wake cycle are the reason why), but DST makes everything worse. Interestingly, the Tuesday following the end of DST was associated with a 21 percent drop in patients.

3. MISSED APPOINTMENTS

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Somewhat relatedly, a 2017 study found that the percentage of missed medical appointments increased significantly following DST. But as with heart attack risk, the missed appointments decreased in the fall—at least temporarily.

4. MORE CAR ACCIDENTS ... MAYBE (AT LEAST FOR A FEW DAYS)

Another field where studies aren't as consistent as one might expect is traffic accidents. In 2001, an American study found that there was a significant increase in accidents on the Monday after the shift to DST. A 2018 New Zealand study echoed the sentiment, finding that on the first day of DST road accidents increased 16 percent. In contrast, a Swedish study found that DST didn’t have any important effect in that country.

Of course, there’s more to DST than just those first couple days. After DST has gotten started, there’s more light on the road later in the day. Several studies have found this light reduces accidents substantially, so much so that one study concluded that a year-round DST would reduce motor vehicle occupant fatalities by 195 per year.

It’s so complicated that a 2010 analysis in Minnesota listed 10 studies that found positive effects of DST on road safety, and six studies that showed negative effects in both the spring and fall changes.

5. LONGER PRISON SENTENCES

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Researchers frequently use DST to study sleep deprivation in populations, as it’s a period of time when we all wake up an hour before we’re used to. One of these studies focused specifically on judicial punishment in U.S. federal courts [PDF]. The researchers looked at “sleepy Monday” (the Monday after the time change) and compared the sentence lengths to other Mondays. They found that on “sleepy Monday,” judges handed out 5 percent longer sentences. But don’t think you can get a lighter sentence during the fall switch; the researchers found no effect on sentencing at that time. But the researchers point out that this probably isn’t limited to judges—even managers may find themselves in the mood for doling out harsher punishments.

6. MORE MINING INJURIES

According to one study of mining injuries from 1983 to 2006, the Monday directly after the switch to DST was associated with 5.7 percent more workplace injuries and 68 percent more workdays lost because of injuries, indicating that there are more injuries that are more severe after the switch [PDF]. There isn’t, however, a corresponding decrease in the fall.

7. FEWER KOALA COLLISIONS

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One study decided to look at how DST affected human-wildlife interaction, specifically koala-vehicle collisions [PDF]. Because koalas are largely nocturnal, they often cross the road in the evening or at night. By shifting traffic patterns to times when it wasn’t dark, the researchers found that DST could “decrease collisions with koalas by 8 percent on weekdays and 11 percent at weekends” (although the difference between weekend and weekdays wasn’t significant, the researchers proposed that a slight increase in morning collisions lessened the benefit during the weekday). The researchers hope that further study can be done on human-animal interactions and DST.

Koalas aren’t the only ones crossing a road that benefit from DST; pedestrians might be safer as well. One study found “no significant detrimental effect on automobile crashes in the short run” and in the long run was associated with “a 8 to 11 percent fall in crashes involving pedestrians ... in the weeks after the spring shift to DST.” Meanwhile another study found that a year-long DST would mean 171 fewer pedestrian fatalities a year.

8. DECREASED SATISFACTION WITH LIFE IN GENERAL (AND INCREASED USE OF THE WORD TIRED)

In both the UK and Germany, studies have shown that life satisfaction deteriorates in the first week after the switch to DST in the spring. One study even quantified the deterioration in Germany with money. For the entire sample, the cost was calculated to be €213 (about $262), but for people in full employment—with relatively inflexible schedules—that increases to €332 ($408). And for the men in the sample, the cost of transition was €396 ($487).

Meanwhile, a Facebook analysis looked at the "feelings" people were sharing on the platform. On the Monday after the start of DST, the use of the word tired increased by 25 percent, with similar increases for “sleepy” and “exhausted” (as well as “wonderful” and “great”). In just the period from 5 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Monday, “feeling tired” usage increased an average of 86 percent, from a 12 percent increase in the non-DST Arizona up to a 231 percent increase in Delaware. By Thursday, “tired” is back to normal.

9. SLEEPIER KIDS (MAYBE)

The studies surrounding DST and school children are surprisingly inconclusive. On the one side, a 2009 article in Sleep Medicine looked at 469 Germans from 10 to 20 years old and divided them up into ‘larks’ (those who go to bed early and wake up early) and ‘owls’ (those who go to bed late and wake up late). They found that after the DST transition the group was sleepier for three weeks after the transition, with owls showing higher daytime sleepiness, and proposed that tests shouldn’t take place in the week following the switch over to DST.

A 2017 article in Economics of Education Review, however, looked at 22,000 Europeans students and found that, at least for low-stakes tests, the effect wasn’t statistically significant.

10. MORE CYBERLOAFING ON THE JOB

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Another study looked at people’s Google search trends for the Mondays before the switch to DST, immediately after the switch, and a week after, with a specific focus on sites like Facebook, YouTube, and ESPN (i.e. entertainment sites that people probably aren’t Googling for their jobs). They found that on the Monday after the switch, people searched for 3.1 percent more entertainment websites than the Monday before DST, and 6.4 percent more than the subsequent Monday. While the researchers caution they can’t be sure this was all "cyberloafing," the fact that there was nothing else special about these Mondays meant it very likely was [PDF].

11. MISTIMED INSULIN SHOTS

It might seem that in this age of smartphones and connected devices that figure it all out, the twice-yearly ritual of finding all the clocks to change is a thing of the past. But that’s not necessarily true. In a 2014 article in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, the authors pointed out an easy clock to miss: insulin pumps. Because most commercial pumps aren’t GPS-enabled and lack internal time change mechanisms, they have to be manually set up. The study authors discuss an international college student with an insulin pump that came from a country that didn’t observe DST, meaning the clock was an hour off. They say that no significant harm resulted, but it just serves as a reminder to make sure you check all your clocks.

12. HIGHER ENERGY BILLS

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One of the main rallying cries for DST is that it saves energy, but studies have been mixed. In 1975 the Department of Transportation issued a report about whether a short-lived, year-long DST experiment had been worthwhile [PDF]. They declared “modest overall benefits might be realized by a shift from the historic six-month DST system,” but cautioned that these benefits were difficult to isolate. Optimistically, though, they said DST might help reduce 1 percent of electricity use.

But as modern researchers have noted, electricity usage has shifted since then. Chief among the changes: Only 46 percent of the new single family households completed in 1975 had air conditioning, compared to 93 percent in 2016 [PDF].

Indiana provided a good place to test this change, because in 2006 they decided to observe DST as an entire state (individual counties had observed DST before). A study ultimately concluded that while DST does save electricity in lighting, this is more than offset by increased demands for heating and cooling, resulting in Indiana households being hit by $9 million per year in higher electricity bills [PDF]. However, the study only looked at residential electricity consumption, not commercial or industrial.

Around the same time, the Department of Energy also looked into DST and found that during a four-week extension, electricity use decreased about half a percentage point per day. Ultimately, Stanton Hadley at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory told Live Science, “I could see the answer being either way.”